[hibikir]

Google has been fighting against SEO basically from the beginning. For many years, you could see the difference with other search engines that had worse tech. In general, google used to do very well against SEO bots, for well over a decade.

Today, I think they are losing. Quality primary sources are often crushed by unusable websites, which understand google's analytics very well. If I make it hard to find the information, but I make it seem that it's the next paragraph down, my search results will improve!

Google itself is causing the enshitification of third party websites, many of which have paragraphs and paragraphs that are obvious spam. I'd take any videogame guide website from 2005 over the first page of google today

[amoss]

Google understood a long time ago that they could not beat SEO, and have been fighting a losing battle ever since. I remember a research presentation from them (might have been late 00s or early 10s) in which they wanted to know: we have an adversary with unlimited resources who can create as many webpages and servers as they want. How do we detect pages in "their" internet as opposed to pages in the "real" internet. The basic answer at the end of the seminar was - you can't. There is no information-theoretic way to do it on the structure of the graph. Instead you need to follow chains of trust, which means that you need roots of trust, which means .... look at the web today, dominated by a handful of known platforms.

[dpkirchner]

It'd be so, so easy for Google to give us the option to remove sites we don't want in search results. (And by give us I mean return to us, of course.)

It does seem like they've finally removed github scrapers like gitmemory -- at least I haven't seen them in a while.

[oneshtein]

You can try uBlackList[1] or honser[2], but it looks like they need an update.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/

[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/